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Voice of Jor-El: Gough talks about ‘Smallville’ finale

Comics2Film/CBR News chatted with “Smallville” producer/writer
Alfred Gough yesterday about the wind-down to the second season of the show.
Gough and partner Miles Millar reinvented Superman for modern audiences and made
it The WB Network’s best performing series.

C2F asked Gough if fans should look for a cliffhanger that will rival last
season’s tornado-powered blowout.

“I think they can because I think what will happen this year is really going
to send the characters spinning into different directions that really set the
table for season three,” Gough said. “Certain questions will be answered but bigger
questions will arise out of the season finale.

In that respect I think you’ll
get a much bigger bang for your buck. But it won’t be like season one to season
two where season two picked up three minutes after season one, this will be
three months will have passed but there are definite cliffhangers and you’re not
sure what’s going to happen as you go into season three.”

Fans who tune in for the season finale will hear a Kryptonian voice, other
than Clark’s, for the first time in the series run.

“We’re going to hear Jor-El’s voice, and
it’s going to be an actor who’s meaningful to Superman fans,” Gough said.
“I won’t tell you
who it is, but any self-respecting Superman fan should be able to name that
actor once they hear the voice.”

In the previous movie franchise, Jor-El (played by Marlon Brando) appeared
and spoke to Clark via a kind of Kryptonian crystal. Gough reports that the
“Smallville” team will put its own spin on the communication.

“I
think the wonderful thing about that movie is that you definitely felt a
connection between those two characters, between Jor-El and Kal-El,” Gough
said. “I think it’s
trying to find that emotional connection. It’s the father and son story again.”

Gough said that the challenge with the how remains the same: how to focus on
the emotional development of the characters and still be true to the larger,
more sci-fi elements of the comic book roots.

“When you’re dealing with superheroes and space ships, you’re always in
the realm of the fantastic but we always try to emotionally ground the
stories,” Gough told C2F. “That’s certainly been a challenge this
season, but to us, it’s always about making the sci fi elements more spiritual
than sort of technical or mechanical.

“It’s hard. It’s a definite balancing act. When you really sort of delve
into…we call it the mythology crack pipe. They’re always fun to do but you
always have to make sure you don’t go too far.”

So what can fans look forward to in season three of “Smallville?”

“If the question of season one is, ‘Who am I’ and the question of
season two is, ‘Where am I from,’ I think the question of season three
is ‘Where am I going,'” Gough told us. “Now that you have all this information, what do
you do with it? Which quite frankly brings us back to Earth, because Krypton’s
gone.”

Gough said that the creative minds behind the show hope to pull in additional
characters from the comics, including one much-rumored guest star.

“We’re certainly going to make a concerted effort to get Bruce Wayne on the
show. I know I’ve been saying that for two years but we really are,” Gough
said. As with Clark, this would be a young, pre-Batman Wayne. “We’d also love to see Jimmy Olsen and Perry White and sort of expand the
Superman universe a bit as well.”

However, most of the major villains from the comics are earmarked for the
feature film franchise. For now, the mandate is that Clark be the only
Kryptonian character in the skein. “You won’t see General Zod or anyone like that, or
even the Eradicator.”

Some fans may hope that “Smallville” dove
tails into the feature film world itself, but Gough said that he and Millar have
had no real conversation about that with the studio.

In the coming weeks, fans
who have access to AOL will get an additional dose of “Smallville” in
the form of “The Chloe Chronicles,” a series of shorts featuring
series co-star Allison Mack. . The video shorts were written by online producer Mark
Warshaw.

“We thought it would be an interesting way to expand not only the mythology of
the show, but for fans to see what Chloe does,” Gough said. Chloe is an
original character created for the series as a sort of guide through the
mysterious of Superman’s home town. “We thought it would be fun to expand on that in a
way, nowhere near as technically well, but the way that the ‘Animatrix’ movies
enhanced what I’m sure will be in ‘The Matrix’ sequels. A fun way to take the
mythology and explore it a little further.”

“We love Allison and Chloe’s such a terrific character and all of these
Kryptonite mutations and what role does Luthor Corp have in this.”

In the feature film world, Gough and Millar are best knows for the
“Shanghai Noon” movie and sequel. However, they’ve also had a hand in
big-screen superheroes, having worked on “Spider-Man 2.” They were
also recently hired to write a script for Marvel’s “Iron Man.” We
asked Gough to share some details about that project.

“I can’t or Avi Arad will send the X-Men out to kill me. But it’s going very
well. Miles and I are writing the script now,” Gough said. “We’re
certainly having a good time doing it.”

He also added, jokingly, “We certainly hope Marvel, one of these
days, will have a hit. I hope one of these days one of these superhero movies
works.”